UFOs - Leslie Kean [1]
INTRODUCTION
Ten years ago, as an investigative reporter working for a California public radio station, I was suddenly confronted with a seemingly impossible reality. A colleague in Paris sent me an extraordinary new study by former high-ranking French officials documenting the existence of unidentified flying objects and exploring their potential impact on national security. Now known as the COMETA Report,1 this unprecedented white paper marked the first time in any country that a group of this size and stature had declared that UFOs—solid but as yet unexplained objects in the sky—constitute a real phenomenon warranting immediate international attention.
The distinguished COMETA authors—thirteen retired generals, scientists, and space experts working independently of the French government—had spent three years analyzing military and pilot encounters with UFOs. In the cases they present, all conventional explanations of something natural or man-made had been eliminated by the authors and their associated teams of experts, and yet these objects were observed at close range by pilots, tracked on radar, and officially photographed. They achieved tremendous speeds and accelerations, made sharp, right-angle turns in a flash, and could stop and stand still in midair, seeming to defy the laws of physics. What could this mean? Since some of the military officers on the COMETA panel were serving with the French Institute of Higher Studies for National Defense, a government-financed strategic planning agency, their characterization of UFOs as a phenomenon with possible national security implications assumed a grave importance.
In their ninety-page report, written with objectivity, clarity, and logic, the authors explained that about 5 percent of sightings—those for which there is enough solid documentation to eliminate other possibilities—cannot be easily attributed to earthly sources, such as secret military exercises or natural phenomena. This 5 percent seem to be “completely unknown flying machines with exceptional performances that are guided by a natural or artificial intelligence.” In its startling conclusion, the authors state that “numerous manifestations observed by reliable witnesses could be the work of craft of extraterrestrial origin.” In fact, they wrote, the most logical explanation for these sightings2 is “the extraterrestrial hypothesis.”
This did not mean that they accepted this conclusion as fact or had any particular beliefs about it one way or the other. They made very clear that the nature and origin of the objects remain unknown. By “hypothesis,” the authors simply meant an unproved theory, a possible, plausible explanation that needed to be tested before it could be decided, but remained only a thesis until that happened. However, the conviction with which they put forth this theory as the “most likely” solution to the puzzle, since others had been ruled out in so many cases, was provocative. Official data about UFOs from around the world was accessible to the members of the group, and they were determined to respond rationally, avoiding prejudice. They did so without reserve.
Who were the people making these statements? Among them, all retired, were a four-star general,3 a three-star admiral, a Major General, and the former